Dominique Delpoux was born in 1962 in the countryside of the Tarn region.

At first glance we know that Delpoux's work is based upon his choices behind what he does and does not include in his image. This discriminative taste clearly identifies him as a practionner of contemporary documentary photography. He asks us to question the everyday world in which we live in order to force ourselves outside of our comfort zone.

Using films as well as going digital, he creates a body of work whose themes are consistent with his exhibitions, privates collections, books and assignments.

Portfolio

Series

Kandorya (2013)

Each year, from 11th to 14th of July, the newly discovered Island of Kandorya is the place where Orcs, Dwarfs, Fearies, Pirates and Merchants gather from everywhere.
Trading spots are built in what looks more and more like a medieval city. Groups are forming; alliances are made and broken up during the entire weekend.
Coming from the imagination of fans of Heroic Fantasy and Mass Larp (a full-size mass role playing), this kind of events, popularized in Canada and Anglo-Saxon countries, has found its place in St. George sur Loire, near the Château de Serrant in France.
The game starts on 11th July, at midday. The park gates are closed and nobody enters or leaves the site. During...

Within the secret valleys of the Pyrenees mountains range, in the South West of France, unusual houses flourish.
Made of straw, canvas or built on wheels, these more or less ecological habitats often go along with social economy, activism and social or emotional breach. Transient, mobile or built to last several years, they also reveal a nomadic precarious reality, temporary or installed, faced by inventing a new way of life. To create a peace haven in a preserved nature, sometimes making compromises with legality.

This story was conducted during the 2008/2009 academic school year during an artist residency at the Chalet school in Toulouse. As for older series like "men on building sites" or "Athletes", "I use images to explore temporality". Every pupil was shot five times during the school year with him in his room. Indivisible, the portraits are shown together and chronologically ordered.

As ever, everything begin with trivial details. Here, leaves are falling out of season; further, a ivy is colonizing such display window; there, a young shoot is cracking out the kerb. By weak habit, the spirit puts up with those aggressions. The threat is now more pressing: pylons are scorned, houses ridiculed, the concrete broken up. Some vegetables, with pure anarchical provocation, maintain the increasing deployment of equivocal forms…Others develop new diseases, preferring the death to the possible submission. Those chlorophyll perversions torment our civilization. And our laxity throws us to the dawn of time, into the original jungle, dense carboniferous chaos.

Photographer Dominique Delpoux uses his trademark diptych technic to portray the French Stade Toulousain rugby union players before and after a game.
These are portraits of high-class rugby players which let imagine of all that could have happened on the field in the meantime, without even showing a ball.

Series realised in 2004 in Albi, Tarn.
During a visit on the rebuilding site of the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum of Albi, I was stood out by the material blend. In the magnificent architecture of the former bishop’s palace, concret and steel came to put on the Albigensian’s brick. Just revealed by the light, the close contact worked in a surprising mix of tone. More than a rebuilding, this mortar is a soldering, a bridge of several years which units the daring contemporary architecture to the medieval construction. This assignment was realised with the support of the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum of Albi.

The prison of Toulouse, Saint Michel, built in 1870, was named “shame of the republic” by the justice property program state secretary. At the end of January 2003, its 480 prisoners were transferred to the new prison of Seysses, 20 kilometres away from Toulouse. Saint Michel, which accommodates semi-liberty prisoners, could be become again a jail.
Dominique Delpoux realises these pictures series of the prison Toulouse-Saint Michel during its last ten days of activity as an assignement of the Midi Pyrénées regional direction of cultural affairs and the regional direction of Toulouse penitentiary services.

Cause and consequence of the previous series, it’s the turn of local elected members to play at “Double I” game. In this way, twenty mayors pose in two different situations. The first portrait is an official one, realised at the city hall. The second portrait is realised in a professional or personal environment, elected by the elected members.

Exhibitions

As part of the Usimages biennial which offers a photographic cross about the questions of representation of man at work and his relation to the machine, Dominique Delpoux presents his triptyches on the workers of the Cofrablack petrochemical factory. Dressed in heavy overalls, they are relieving each other day and night to product carbon black. At the end of their shift, they go to the changing room to clean the dust which darken the faces until inside of the eyelid. Dominique Delpoux here exposes eight triptyches of three portraits he made ; two in front of the factory at the beginning and...

« Clothes don’t make the man » says a popular French proverb with the same meaning than « don’t judge a book by its cover. » But from the 1st to the 31th of October, the Musée de Bretagne contradicts this famous saying through its exhibition When Clothes Make the Man. Photographs of work wear. Indeed, when it’s about work clothes, appearances are not always deceptive – photo collections of the Musée de Bretagne reveal the codes and symbols of work clothes from 1850 to the present. It invited the photographer Dominique Delpoux (VU’ Agency) in residence. For more than 20 years, this inhabitant...

« Clothes don’t make the man » says a popular French proverb with the same meaning than « don’t judge a book by its cover. » But from the 1st to the 31th of October, the Musée de Bretagne contradicts this famous saying through its exhibition \"When Clothes Make the Man. Photographs of work wear.\" Indeed, when it’s about work clothes, appearances are not always deceptive – photo collections of the Musée de Bretagne reveal the codes and symbols of work clothes from 1850 to the present. It invited the photographer Dominique Delpoux (VU’ Agency) in residence. For more than 20 years, this...

During summer 2010, the COFRABLACK factory that produces carbon black in France opened its doors to Dominique Delpoux. The photographer, interested in his work with the body, took picture of the workmen before their day of work, and then after, when they take off their overalls.

While photographic production on French society is unfortunately too sparse, or mediocre, Dominique Delpoux questions us about the world in which we live in. With these photographs, he imposes questions, makes us look closer our everyday life, he destabilises us with regard to consensus and comfort. In other words, as he knows that rigorous devices in photography are productive, he brings up with modesty an essential questioning on the state of our society. He presents here a series of diptychs: “the boxers”. A first photography is taken before the fight, a second one after it, before the...

There is a great temptation to create duplicates from a single copy, at least when working with images. For almost fifteen years now, Dominique Delpoux's photographic process has involved asking questions about identity. The sociological content of this process can clearly be grasped and it is backed up by numerous pieces of work all brought together within a powerful concept : it is always about capturing differences through similarities, the transformation brought about a single face, a single person, by time, a job, an environment or a background with the aim of bringing out life...